I’m usually a sloppy Christmas shopper. I wait until the last few days to get any presents, mostly because I never know what to gift anyone. This year however marked a huge improvement as I had my Christmas shopping done by the 5th of December.

If you’re not as lucky and you still have some gift shopping left for your friends, family members, partners, and you know them to be Android fans, I have compiled this list of great last-minute gift ideas. As a big Android fan, I guarantee I’d be happy with any item mentioned below.

For the past three months, I have been using an LG Optimus 4X along with my Samsung Galaxy S3. To be honest, I came to LG with a lot of reticence and excitement. After all, when you consider the spec sheet, they always seem to have winner devices on their hands but somehow this fails to translate into real blockbusters. Part of it is probably due to their Android skin: while you might find a few people who love HTC’s Sense or Samsung’s TouchWiz / Nature UI, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who’ll blatantly tell you that they favor LG’s Optimus UI.

I’m here to debunk that myth. Three months in, I’ll easily proclaim that if I were to run a non-stock Android device as is, without any mods, I’d pick LG over any other OEM. Actually, if it weren’t for custom ROMs like FoxHound, the S3 would be unusable for me. By comparison, I use the Optimus 4X as it came out of the box and I love it. Below are five reasons why.

It’s National Novel Writing Month once again, time to challenge yourself to write 50000 words in 30 days, no easy feat! But with your Android device by your side, you can keep working on your novel or non-fiction book anywhere and anytime. Throughout this week, we’ll share our best apps, thoughts, and tips to help you achieve that writing goal.

Earlier today, my colleague Abhimanyu Ghoshal reviewed Thumb Keyboard and explained how it’s helping him write on-the-go with nothing but Nexus 7. I, on the other hand, have bought and use a bluetooth hardware keyboard. As a matter of fact, I’m typing this on my Nexus 7 using it.

In this article I’m going to explain the benefits of using wireless keyboards with your Android device and show how much easier you can make your everyday life.

If you use Google Apps, you already know that your email, contacts, and calendar are automatically synced between your computer and your phone without needing to connect the two via cables. But did you know that you can do a lot more with this two-way connection?

In this roundup, we’ll take a look at apps that let you type long text messages on your computer keyboard, use your phone as a mouse for your computer, manage your PC downloads remotely, call friends using your computer’s sound system and microphone, and pretty much anything else (except for charging the device) — all without wires. It’s wireless nirvana!

After reading this article, you’ll be able to use your Android phone as a webcam for Skype, Google Talk, Facebook, or any other program on your computer that can use a webcam. I was frustrated that Skype didn’t allow video chat for my phone when they recently updated their app to allow this, and decided to figure out a way to do this using the existing video camera on my phone. Why buy a separate webcam if you can use the one in your pocket?

Note: only some Android phones work using this method, and some newer phones have a dedicated webcam built in.

With the rise of obesity and sedentary lifestyles we have also witnessed a surge in services and applications that help you stay healthy or track your progress on the way back to better habits. From Apple’s Nike + iPod integration to Nokia’s push of Sports Tracker with the special N79 Active package, and thanks to modern smartphones sporting an accelerometer that can also serve as a pedometer, there has been, for the last few years, a great choice of gear and software for the sports addict who also happens to be a technology enthusiast.

We have all been in this situation before: you’re driving, you remember you need to call someone or you get a call, and you start fumbling around, first to find your phone and then to find the keys to press to get the call done. For some of us, it doesn’t happen often; for others it’s not urgent and can wait until you pull aside; yet, for many, it’s a frequent scenario that the era of touchscreen phones hasn’t made the least bit easier.

I fell into this routine a few months ago, when I bought my pharmacy’s shop 50 minutes away from my house, with 20 minutes of these on a sinuous mountain road. I knew I had to get a bluetooth headset or car kit, and after much online searching, I stopped at the Clip and Talk Bluetooth Car Kit V3+ thanks to its features and multipoint support. (more…)